Often times, companies send surveys to gather customer feedback at the end of a support interaction or purchase. While valuable, this reactive surveying methodology provides a rather short-sighted view on customer satisfaction.

Companies looking to gather customer insights often invest huge amounts of financial and human resources in formal customer feedback programs. But does simply listening to your customers really require all of that?

With just a few clicks, you can send the one-question survey that asks “How likely are you to recommend my company to someone you know?” and gather feedback from your customers instantly. With 53% of NPS survey respondents leaving open-ended feedback, this wealth of customer insights quickly reveals:

Why detractors (customers who gave the rating 0-6) are having a bad experience

What are the high hurdles preventing passives (customers who gave the rating 7-8) from becoming promoters

Exactly why promoters (customers who gave the rating 9-10) love your company

From there, subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters gives you an easy view of your NPS, which Zendesk automatically calculates and reports for you. What this single score allows you to do is to set a high standard for improvement for your business.

To bring this full circle, each customer’s NPS rating and comment are automatically displayed on their user profile in your Zendesk, so your team will always know how the customer feels about your business before they even say hello. What would you do differently if you knew your customer was a detractor and not a promoter? You’ll probably tailor your conversation quite a bit to fit your customer’s sentiment.

But beyond the score, the value the NPS survey brings is both in the quantitative and qualitative information it provides.

For Walker & Co, the makers of Bevel, NPS is a simple survey that allows them to gather customer feedback. They can use the information to adjust how they handle customer experience management and learn why customers love their brand.

“It’s so refreshing to get these insights from our customers,” Jaimel Gauda, Head of Customer Success, said. “For us, NPS is more than just a score. We learn a ton from the feedback and apply our learnings so we can design a better shopping and product experience for our customers.”

So what exactly are customers saying in the qualitative feedback they give to companies? That’s what our team set out to understand for our Q3 Zendesk Benchmark report.

RESEARCH FINDINGS ON NPS TRENDS

Over the last couple months, our customers have been piloting the Zendesk NPS survey tool and have sent over a million surveys to their customers. So our data research team dug into the NPS data of 230 companies and 103,000 surveys responses to explore some early NPS trends. Here’s what we uncovered:

1) Customers want to leave detailed feedback, and this information is a treasure trove for companies. 53% of NPS survey respondents choose to leave open-ended comments explaining why they gave the rating they did. Looking at the length of open feedback as measured by word count, 75% of detractor comments contain more than 50 words. Your unhappy customers want to be heard!

2) Customer service is the top reason why a customer would recommend or not recommend a company. When analyzing customer feedback from NPS surveys, the top phrase that is correlated to promoter feedback is “great service,” while the top keyword correlated to detractor feedback is “poor customer service.” In other words, a company’s customer support organization is one of the most critical components in ensuring your customers stay customers for life.

3) Customers who received great service are more likely to spread the word. 62% of customers that previously rated a customer service interaction as good were categorized as promoters after their NPS surveys. In contrast, only 17% of customers that previously rated customer service interaction as bad are promoters. A customer experience can have ripple effects down the line—impacting a customer’s likelihood to not just remain a customer but also to recommend your company to others.

For more NPS data goodness and our benchmark country and industry movers and shakers, check out the full Q3 benchmark report.

The Zendesk NPS survey is available today for free to all customers on our Plus, Enterprise, and Enterprise Elite plans. To dig into more information and details, take a look at the announcement post by the product manager behind this feature.